


belacqua

by EtherealPrince



Category: His Dark Materials (TV)
Genre: Affairs, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dadriel, F/M, LGBTQ Themes, Unplanned Pregnancy, trans lord asriel, trans marisa coulter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:00:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26810011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtherealPrince/pseuds/EtherealPrince
Summary: Lyra Belacqua's origins, but not quite how they are depicted in canon. Asriel-centric.
Relationships: Lord Asriel & Lyra Belacqua, Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter
Kudos: 11





	belacqua

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is my first work for His Dark Materials, which i literally just finished watching today, and it inspired me so much I wanted to write something with this idea that's been floating around in my head about both of lyra's parents being trans. i haven't read the books, so this is faithful only to the TV show, sorry!  
> i hope i got everybody's characters right, they're kind of hard to pin down. asriel i admit is probably a little ooc in this, so i'll take that L.  
> please tell me what you think! comments make my day <3

“You don’t come from nothing, Lyra.” Asriel had told her. “You're the product of something extraordinary.”

Lyra’s big brown eyes were piercing in the darkness of the lab as they looked him in the face, daring him to add another thorned barb or an irritated complaint in her direction after he had spoken to her so softly, so fatherly. He had shown her nothing but annoyance and dismissiveness thus far; she was right to expect such from him.

He wanted to leave yet her eyes, her mother’s eyes, held him in place where he stood far longer than he preferred. 

She was so grown up now, and so wise, after everything she’d been through to bring the alethiometer to him. Regrettably, she had inherited his recklessness and wanderlust, but not so regrettably she had inherited his curiosity and passion for learning. She was disappointed in Asriel, that much was true, but when he had watched her and Roger look out at the aurora with rapt attention and boundless awe he felt the hard walls he had built up against her over the years begin to crack.

Now was not the time. There was work to be done, on this, the eve of his crossing.

When Asriel turned his back to her and left his daughter to her own devices for the night, he didn’t watch to see the expression on her face change. He would never know what she truly thought of him after that night, he knew that, because if all went well he might never see her again.

The prophecy spoke of Lyra, that she would be the one upon which the balance of all worlds fell on, that was true. She was one of myth, her birth foretold by the witches hundreds of years before she was even a thought. That was what everyone thought made her extraordinary.

To Asriel, and also to Marisa, it was something else entirely.

He left Lyra on her own in the main room of the lab and retreated to his room. Stelmaria followed him silently, and when he pulled the heavy door to his quarters closed she rubbed her head against the side of his leg, nudging him toward his bed. It wasn’t like her to be so caring with him, but then again, she was a projection of his own thoughts and emotions. Asriel would let himself feel, just for tonight.

He sat down heavily on the side of his bed, leaning his forearms on his knees and threading his fingers through his hair. Strands of grey fell in front of his eyes.

Stelmaria leapt up on the bed next to him and sat on her haunches, laying her head on his shoulder. “Thorold had a point. You should say goodbye to her.”

Asriel’s brow furrowed. “That’s what I just did.”

“No you didn’t.” Stelmaria purred, heavy and warm against him. “You tried to, but you couldn’t. Even now you keep secrets from Lyra, secrets that she deserves to know.”

“She knows everything.” Asriel mumbles, dragging his hands from his head down over his face.

Stelmaria says nothing, but her silence is enough of an answer by itself. Lyra didn’t know everything.

No one except Asriel and Marisa knew everything. That’s how it should be, Asriel thinks.

His daemon makes a mournful sort of sound into his shoulder. “She’s your cub, Asriel… why aren’t we keeping her?”

He huffs. She knows why. “I can’t take her where I’m going. She’ll never forgive me.”

“You know you have thoughts about staying here. With her, and with the boy. You want to turn back and abandon your work for her.”

With a loud sigh Asriel takes his hands off of his face and interlocks his fingers in-between his knees. “But my _work_ is more valuable than her life. Than my life. This is about the freedom of worlds, Stelmaria. Not a place for one’s heart to get in front of their mind.” 

“Your heart is powerful.” She murmurs.

“I can’t allow it to be.”

“Your connection to Lyra is more powerful, and you can’t do anything about that.”

Asriel doesn’t answer her. Stelmaria is trying to goad him into not going on with the intercision project, but if he doesn’t the Magisterium and Marisa will kill him and ruin decades of priceless, heretic work. He has no other choice.

_(I have no choice!)_

He will hurt his child. Asriel has been preparing himself for this ever since she turned up at his door, but he still doesn’t know if his heart will be able to take it. She already thinks he hates her; that’s painful enough. Necessary, but painful.

Why must he always choose the difficult way of doing everything, he wonders.

Asriel raises his clasped hands in front of his mouth and rests them on his lips, breathing out cold air into warm skin. His breath shakes as he stares resolutely at his closed door.

If everything goes right, he will never see Lyra again. If everything goes right, he will never have to face her disappointed gaze and angry words again.

But oh, god, did it hurt.

One harsh breath in, and Asriel feels something warm and wet on his cheek. Stelmaria leans over to lick the single tear away, and he leans into her neck, burying his face in her thick fur. He was remembering, now. Things he didn’t want to think about. He was only making this harder for himself, he knew, but just this once--just this once, before the crossing, he decided he would allow himself to feel it.

“I have to leave her.” He whispers. Stelmaria noses gently at his hair, and her tail wraps around his back. “I have to leave--leave my...I have to leave my baby.”

Asriel and his daemon mourn together. Cutting Roger from his daemon would create something world changing, something incredible, but at what cost. The best thing Asriel had ever made would hate him for the rest of her days, and he accepted that.

Stelmaria guides him gently to lay down in his bed, tugs one of the fur blankets over his torso with her teeth, and curls up next to him, for a last short spot of rest before his final expedition. He slips an arm around her strong body and curls his fingers up in her fur before spreading them out again. Curl, spread, curl, spread- just as he had been doing for decades whenever he was troubled. He falls asleep uneasily to the sound of generators clicking and fluorescent lights humming and the snowy wind howling outside.

\------------

Past twelve years ago, when Lyra wasn’t even a concept and Asriel was still very young, his daemon settled as a snow leopard. This alarmed his entire family and everyone who knew him--but not because of Stelmaria’s species, it was the fact that she took the form of a female and spoke with a female voice.

He rolled around with her in the grass of his father’s estate, dirtying his hair and his clothes, while lords and ladies looked on in concern. Back then, he wasn’t sure why everyone seemed so disappointed in him, but years later he learned, and he became angry.

Little boys get female daemons and little girls get male daemons, all the books said, and to Asriel that made perfect sense, but he was not like the other boys he saw in town. He had long hair, his mother put him in dresses, and called him a name he didn’t care much for at all. He wasn’t allowed to play with his friends on weekends and adults were condescending toward him. They called him ‘little lady’, and he _hated_ it. Stelmaria told him to pay the grown-ups no mind, they just didn’t understand the two of them, and so he did.

From his settling age, twelve, and onwards, Asriel wanted to get out of Oxfordshire and get away from his family. He wanted to wear a decent pair of _pants,_ for god’s sake, no more skirts. He wanted to be a _he._

When he told his mother and father that they had been wrong about them at age 18, and that he was going to move out and change his name to something more suitable for a young man, they let him go--but it was more as if they shoved him out the door and watched him leave for the nearest airship station like he was a beggar on the street. Pityingly.

No matter--he went into the city and changed his name, and that was that. Asriel Belacqua was official, now, and he had classes to go to.

He lived in London and went to college and learned about many things. About people, about animals, about daemons, about places. He learned about the witches in the north and the Magisterium’s politics. He learned, and he grew, and there was no skirt or dress in his wardrobe to ever be seen.

Asriel obtained a doctor that prescribed him injections of testosterone that put hair on his face and deepened his voice, and when people on the street asked for his help and called him sir, or young man, his heart soared with joy. Leaving his parents was the best decision he had ever made, he was sure, because here in London he was thriving. Stelmaria and he carried on in life in their own way, by their own beat, and that was how Asriel liked it.

After college, Asriel made very good use of his family’s fortune and used it to follow his heart all over the world, researching jungles and deserts and tundras and wherever an airship would take him. He came close to death once, twice, three times, and escaped by the skin of his teeth to go back to England and tell scholars and other explorers what he’d found. His recklessness and bravery let him find and witness things that few had ever dared to search for before, and he became very popular among everyone in the business of _finding things._

Lord Asriel, for he was a grown lord now, had made a name for himself in the educational boards of London and Oxfordshire and worked with many a celebrity in the field of exploratory research into uncharted areas. Men and women alike hung off of his arm in attempts to get attention from him, and he had many an affair with many a fling. Elderly scholars and professors gave him looks when he passed them, because of his infamy, but he paid them no mind. He was still a genius, and he knew they knew that.

And then, and then. And then he met Marisa.

She was holding a party at her husband’s (very important, that piece of information) sprawling mansion, and by some way or another Asriel had been invited. He had never loved parties, mind, except for the part where he got drunk, but he attended anyway just to be polite. He hung around in corners, speaking when spoken to, slowly making his way through a bottle of deep red wine that burned his throat and left his head buzzing quite pleasantly, and considered leaving until the lady of the hour approached him. 

Marisa was a beautiful woman, that much was obvious- her dark eyes sparkled with something deep and dangerous and her ruby-red lips curled up into such an inviting smile that even Asriel, the dismissive and noncommittal explorer, was enraptured by her. 

“My husband,” She sighed to him, “Was never much a fan of exploration. Your work interests me greatly.”

“Does it now?” Asriel had replied, leaning against a plateau on a column and toying with his wine glass. “I can show you if you’d like someday. I have a lab in town.”

Marisa smiled with perfectly white teeth. “It’s a date.” 

Funny choice of words, that. “I dream of having a _real_ lab up in the north, where much of my work takes me, but...I’m still working up to it, I suppose.”

Marisa was enchanted. She listened to him speak about his travels for the whole night of the party, about where he’d been and what he’d seen, and she so earnestly wished to do the same that it honestly floored him. Can’t you divorce your husband and do what you wish, he asked? No, she had replied, it’s too important to my family that I stay with him to do most of anything.

Asriel’s heart had broken for her, it really had, and he urged her to meet with him again so that he could give her just a taste of what she had always dreamed of. That night they had parted ways with decadent plans for the future and the desire to see each other again.

What started out as a friendly relationship made from curiosity and passion quickly turned...into more.

Every time Marisa and Asriel saw each other, the little flame that was lit between them grew just slightly brighter. She was beautiful, and intelligent, and crafty, and one day Asriel looked at her and felt love.

“But her husband,” Stelmaria insisted to him when they were alone, “She’s married. You can’t have an affair with a married woman, it’ll ruin your reputation!”

“Not if no one finds out, it won’t.” Asriel decided, and that was all.

Marisa and Asriel pursued a relationship in secret, behind Edward Coulter’s back, meeting in cramped bars and in the back of airships and in unpopulated parks no one of their status went to. They were in love, away from everyone, and it was perfect.

When they first met up to have sex, Asriel had hesitated--he always did. But this time, Marisa hesitated too, and soon enough he got to find out why.

“We’re alike, you and I.” He had murmured reverently to her, blue eyes taking in her naked body for the first time as she laid in his bed. She had given him a cautious look, coy in her nervousness, and then he removed his own clothes and she gasped silently. 

“We are.” She whispered, and tears welled up in her eyes. 

Asriel held her, kissed her, ran his hands through her hair and sucked bruises into her collarbone until she moaned. She held his hips as he slipped a hand down to wrap around her cock, and gasped into his neck as he worked her to completion in near silence. It was a new, intimate kind of love that Asriel had never quite experienced before-- she intoxicated him with it. He knew he’d never find another woman like her that suited him so perfectly.

Marisa and Asriel wanted to go on like this forever, in perfect secrecy, but the witches taught every human being on earth that fate did not often go the way one wants.

One night when they were at Asriel’s place again, laying tangled and half-dressed together in his sheets, he turned his head into her hair and told her that he was pregnant.

At first Marisa was horrified, terrified, but Asriel calmed her down. No one would ever know about the baby, he assured her, and if they did know it would be easy to pass her off as an orphan. 

“You can adopt them, Marisa.” He told her. “You can pretend they were left on your doorstep and Edward will believe it. You know he’s as dense as a brick.”

She had laughed, tearfully, and draped herself over him and cried into his neck. She was scared about what would happen to them when the baby was born, and Asriel tried to stay strong about it for the both of them. He always had a plan and an excuse for everything--he just had yet to come up with one for this.

The nine months Asriel spent carrying his daughter were likely the worst nine months he had ever lived through, and for multiple reasons.

Obviously, his altered physiology did not agree with the pregnancy at all. The sickness he contracted was debilitating and there was not a moment that went by when any part of him wasn’t in pain. For Marisa’s safety, as well, he and she had halted their meetings significantly and slowed them down to occurring once a month.

He missed her terribly, and at times resented her for not fighting to stay. Edward Coulter was a powerful, paranoid man, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted Marisa to stay. He wanted her comfort and her love when he was suffering so much. Asriel knew it was better for them if they didn’t see each other, but he knew a lot of things and went against most of them.

Every time he saw her, she looked more and more tired. Every time he saw her, he brought with him information regarding the baby and what messengers of the witches had been pestering him about in the weeks prior.

A prophecy was what they whispered of. A chosen one, a child that destiny hung on. Asriel wanted no part of it. He didn’t want his child to be chosen by anything that might make their life miserable.

Marisa and he oftentimes were not in good spirits when they met, during this year, but they brought each other solace from their tiring lives. She would lay her head on Asriel’s shoulder and place her arm over his midsection and talk sleepily to him about names, about the extra rooms in the mansion she could have refurbished into a nursery. Asriel looked around his cramped lab and studio and thought that _this is no place for a child._

He thought that he was not fit to be a father, and it scared him.

He had no skills in parenting to speak of, no particular fondness for children, no experience with caring for young. He worried that Stelmaria might scare the child, that _he_ might scare a child who was expecting a mother and not a father. He feared being stuck in one place while they grew up, and not being able to travel--that was what scared him the most. 

Marisa insisted she would try to take the child in, but it was hard to tell whether it’d be possible or not. If it looked too much like Asriel her husband would be furious, so they prayed that they wouldn’t. If anything, Marisa just wanted them to have Asriel’s ice-blue eyes.

For all the good luck that Asriel had managed to accrue over the years, it seemed to fall all on Marisa, for she was there when the baby first started to kick. Asriel had thought it was just some sort of sickness or discomfort, since it was not uncommon for him to have those nowadays, but Marisa had told him to shut up and spread her fingers over his belly and gone quiet. He watched her, eyebrow raised, and she gave him a look like he was a particularly dense child.

“You really don’t know anything about having children, do you.” She chastised him, and in that moment Asriel lost his patience.

“Just tell me what’s happening, woman!” She snapped at her, and she rolled her eyes, unaffected.

“Your _child_ is _kicking._ Here, pay attention-” And then she took his broad palm and placed it where she had had her hand moments ago, and Asriel tried to focus on what she had felt. It took a moment, but before long...there was something. It didn’t really feel like any sort of limb, really, just something, something pushing back against his hand from inside his own body.

Asriel moved his hand to a different spot on his stomach, and before long he was nudged over there, too. They were following the warmth.

He looked up at Marisa with a new kind of blurriness in his eyes, hating himself for feeling and loving it at the same time, and she placed her hand on his cheek. 

“I love you.” She whispered.

Asriel swallowed thickly, and then found his voice. “I love you too.”

It was the middle of August when Lyra was born.

Marisa was not there. She was busy as she had never been before with her husband and with her work while Asriel labored in his home, too proud to call for a midwife and too stubborn to insist harder that Marisa come. He had sent her one message, and that he had deemed enough.

The sun set on his studio as he paced around restlessly, Stelmaria padding along behind him with her tail tucked between her back legs. Asriel leaned over the windowsill and stared into the blazing sky as contractions gripped his insides and the child thrashed within him. He wasn’t going to get any sleep that night.

Before long, the pains brought him down to the ground next to his bed and he knelt half-clothed over towels Stelmaria had thankfully had the foresight to tug over. She sat, stalwart beside him, as he sweat and strained and tried to muffle groans of discomfort into his hand. For hours he had been going, but still the child had not made an appearance.

At one point he had slammed his fist against his wooden bedframe and yelled his throat horse with one mighty breath. Stelmaria whined and pushed her head against his hand, forcing him to uncurl his fingers, and licked the blood from his palm that his nails had drawn from it.

“Where is Marisa,” He gasped, “She should be here.”

“I don’t know.” Stelmaria whispered to him, with her ears back and her tail tucked. She was scared. “But for our sake I hope she arrives soon.”

Asriel was not able to reply, for another contraction had overtaken him, but she didn’t need to hear him speak to know that he felt the same.

When his water eventually broke, bringing with it blood onto the floor and onto his skin, Asriel ungainly clambered up onto his bed and collapsed there. Stelmaria joined him, and curled up behind his head so that she could act as a pillow for him to hold onto. She felt his pain, felt his agony, and she too feared for the child.

Asriel turned his face into her neck and reached up to grasp her fur as an anchor, his sweat-soaked hair laying heavy on her pelt, but she didn’t mind. If Marisa wasn’t there, she was the next best thing. She watched him as he curled forward and bore down every other minute, still trying to keep his voice down even as he brought his first child into the world. Many envied him for his intelligence, but his strength was what possessed him to gain it.

Even though Stelmaria couldn’t see what was happening as far as the baby’s progress was concerned, she still knew through Asriel. She felt the white-hot, searing ache he felt as the child’s head finally left him, felt his sigh of relief as if coursed through his body, felt him tense up when the pains started again and he was reminded that he wasn’t done.

“Never again.” He grunted under his breath. “Never again am I doing this. Oh, god.”

Stelmaria licked the side of his head and urged him to keep going, and he did. He pushed and strained and hid tears in her pelt and she watched, always watched. 

At one point he was frozen, muscles as taut as a bowstring, and then all of a sudden it was like a thread holding Asriel up had been cut and he collapsed heavily onto his daemon, making her startle. “Asriel?” She asked, tone cautious. He did not answer, and for a moment she only heard his heavy, labored breathing, but then he lifted his head up off her ever so slightly and his lips curled up into a tired smile.

“There you are.” He whispered, and Stelmaria shuffled gently out from under his neck to look down at the end of the bed and saw a tiny baby, already testing her limbs' movement out and squalling loudly. She was covered in blood and other fluids, as was Asriel, but it was no matter to any of them. He motioned to his daemon, beckoning- “Help me sit up.”

Stelmaria dutifully tugged him up into a sitting position against his pillows and watched silently as he leaned over, wincing with every slight movement, to pick up the child and bring her to his chest. Clumsily, he unbuttoned the top of his woolen shirt with one hand as much as it would allow him, and let the baby’s head rest against his clavicle once enough of his skin was revealed. With that same hand he pulled a blanket off of the bed that wasn’t bloodied and wrapped it around his daughter, shielding her from the cool nighttime breeze that wafted through the house’s windows. Taking care of the umbilical cord and other less savory duties could wait- this was his first look at his baby girl.

She waved her arms up at him and tried to grasp onto his short beard, and Asriel laughed. “Not so fast, my girl. You just came and you already want to make mischief?”

Stelmaria made an amused sound, and crossed her paws as she laid herself down beside father and daughter. “Where is her daemon?”

Asriel used one finger to slowly pull one of the baby’s hands down from her chest, and revealed the tiniest little baby bird, tucked into her side. “There.”

He tilted her down so that Stelmaria could see, and she purred, nuzzling the top of her head. “She’s beautiful, Asriel. You did well.”

He huffed a sigh, and closed his eyes for a moment. He agreed, but there was still something missing. “I would have rather not been alone for it.” He grumbles, and Stelmaria nods slowly.

“What will you name her?”

Asriel thinks back to what he and Marisa had talked about, months earlier. She had so wanted a daughter, and had lists upon lists of names for her, so there were many to choose from...but Asriel would have been lying if he said he didn’t have a favorite of the ones she proposed.

“I think...Lyra.” He says quietly, looking down upon his daughter as she groggily blinked her eyes open for the first time. “Lyra Belacqua. How does that sound?”

“Perfect.” Stelmaria rumbles happily. And after a moment, she adds “I would like her daemon to be called Pantalaimon.”

It was a good name, Asriel thought. Whimsical and free. Like Pan, the mythological figure who tricked gods and bargained with the heavens. He hoped his daughter would grow up to do such things. “Then Pantalaimon his name shall be.”

The next time Asriel saw Marisa after Lyra’s birth, it was in an alleyway behind the North Arctic College where he had caught her leaving for the day. He pulled her into the shadows and kissed her, pushed up against the wall, and she had looked shocked to see him. Of course she would be, he thought, he wasn’t pregnant anymore.

“You need to meet your daughter.” He insists, and Marisa follows him home to see her child proper.

She cries when she holds Lyra for the first time, apologizes to her in-between kissing her head for not attending her birth. She apologizes to Asriel, too, collapses in his arms and hides her face in his chest while she chokes out how Edward had been running her ragged with work and denying her any chance to go out alone. He was suspicious.

Marisa is devastated when she gives Lyra back to Asriel and tells him that she can’t keep her.

“Why not?” He asks her, bewildered. Wasn’t this the plan all along?

“She looks too much like you.” She gasps. “Everyone will know she’s your daughter, and everyone will see that she has my--my eyes!”

It’s almost as if Marisa is scared of Lyra, Asriel thinks, but he still doesn’t understand why she is so unwilling to take her. He is no excuse for a father, he’s terrified of raising her, surely Marisa would be better for her in the long run.

“We have to hide her.” She tells him instead, and his eyes widen in nonbelief. “You can’t take her, but neither can I. There’s no other choice but to hide.”

Asriel hates facing that as the truth, but as much as he hates it Marisa has a point. With stuttering breath, he looks down at Lyra in his arms and then back at his love. “I have estates- I know a Gyptian woman. She can take care of her while we sort things out.”

He says Sort Things Out with a fierce stare toward Marisa, one eyebrow raised, so she knows that he’s not going to keep Lyra in the darkness forever. Marisa nods gratefully, leaning forward to plant red lips on his cheek, and he turns his head to catch her on the lips in turn. “We can’t leave her unprotected, you know that. We both have enemies.”

“I know.” Marisa murmurs, eyelashes fluttering as she pulls away from his lips. “She won’t be with your Gyptian forever.”

With that taken as a promise, Asriel and Marisa both go their separate ways once more and Asriel takes Lyra to Oxfordshire, leaves her in the care of Maggie Costa with little information. Marisa gave birth to her, he tells Maggie, and she looks too much like me. Her husband must never know.

Maggie believes him, and that’s all he wanted from her. He leaves the Oxfordshire estate with Stelmaria and goes back to London, feeling...empty. It was for Lyra’s own good, that she wasn’t in his or Marisa’s care, it had to be. The thought circled endlessly in his mind as he left.

Fate struck again a month after Lyra was born and Marisa and Asriel were attempting to return to normal life. Asriel made his reappearance in public after disappearing on a ‘trip’ for some number of months, and Marisa kept an eye on him from far away under the heavy hand of her husband, and everything was alright.

Or so it seemed to be, until Edward found out about Lyra.

Asriel was away from home when he got word from Marisa that Edward was in Oxfordshire, and that scared him enough, but when Marisa told him he meant to kill Lyra he dropped everything and headed back as fast as he was able. Lyra was a bastard child, and now that the information that Marisa Coulter had _had_ a bastard child was public she was being shamed by every faction of society and her husband was furious.

Asriel arrived at his Oxfordshire estate at the same time as Edward, and while Ms. Costa protected Lyra upstairs they destroyed the first floor fighting with each other. Stelmaria tussled with Edward’s ferret daemon and Asriel all but trashed his home with gunshots, trying to nail the slippery snake of a fellow as he tried to make it upstairs to Lyra. As he scrambled up the staircase, Asriel hurriedly refilled his pistol, and with his first shot aimed to get Edward anywhere that could slow him down he managed to nail him right in the back of the head.

Edward fell slowly, like a tree, and slid down the stairs until he rested at the bottom, a mangled hole where his mouth used to be. His daemon disintegrated into sparkling light and Stelmaria nudged his body with her paw, seeming to make sure that he was dead. Asriel breathed hard, hand slipping around the handle of his pistol, and slowly made his way up to where Maggie was hiding with Lyra to check and see if they were alright.

“You’re bleeding, m’lord.” Maggie whimpered, holding Lyra tight and unharmed in her arms, and Asriel lifts a hand to the side of his head to find it wet and red. It meant nothing to him now that Edward was no longer a threat to his family, and with something like hysteria he dropped to his knees upon the wood floor and laughed.

When he broke the news of Edward’s death to Marisa, Asriel was not met with joy, as he had expected, but with blinding anger. His head snapped to the side with the force of Marisa’s slap and she grasped him tightly by the shoulders, shaking him.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” She hisses at him. “You’ve ruined everything! He was exercising his right of revenge against you for having an affair with me, and even though he threatened your child you’ll still be punished!”

“Whatever punishment I get will mean nothing to me, not as long as you and Lyra are--”

She hits his chest to shut him up, and tells him to do as such: “Shut _up!_ Lyra’s brought nothing but shame and scandal to me since she was born, I thought we--I thought she was going to be _secret!”_

“She was,” Asriel insisted, confused. “I don’t know how Edward found out, but now he’s not a threat anymore.”

“But the Magisterium _is._ You are so _stupid,_ Asriel, this could lose us everything! It would have been easier on me to just let Edward kill her!”

Asriel steps away from Marisa then, expression quickly morphing into one of shock. He opens his mouth to try and say something in response, anything, but Marisa had completely blindsided him and for once he had nothing to say. 

He snaps his mouth shut, hardens his gaze toward her. “So that’s how it is.”

And then Asriel walks away. Marisa is left alone, watching his back retreat from her, and he hopes she feels guilt over what she had just admitted to him.

She was right about the punishment--Asriel, while in court, ends up getting a lesser punishment than what he would have gotten for killing a man in cold blood because he was rightfully defending his child, but Edward was justified in his revenge, and Lyra was a bastard. The Magisterium takes everything away from Asriel: his estates, his money, his power and influence. He is left only as an explorer with one house to his name and the bare bones of a job, and after the scandal dies down Marisa doesn’t want any part of him anymore.

He asks after Lyra, just once.

“She is to be placed in a nunnery where she will be raised among other orphans with parents unfit to raise them.” He is told by an emotionless social worker from the government, and his skin crawls at the phrase ‘parents unfit to raise them’. It only serves to enforce his beliefs that he would never be an adequate father. Why did the child of prophecy have to be stuck with he and Marisa for parents, of all people? Lyra didn’t deserve that.

Asriel goes back to work, or at least he tries to. He’s not looked upon with the same respect he once was, he doesn’t get as much funding to continue his travels, and he stays infuriatingly in London, in a place that only held bad memories now. He and Marisa stay far away from each other, driven apart by what their daughter had brought them, but they both ached for her, he knew that. Asriel hoped that she at least was happy, wherever she was. She and Pantalaimon, her little trickster. He hoped she was strong.

When The Great Flood came to England, Asriel was slowly gaining traction again, and he was more thankful than ever that he had access to his gyrocopter that could save him from the rising tides of the rivers and oceans that threatened to drown all of Britain. He watched the water roll onto the mainland from the sky, his ever-faithful assistant Thorold in the seat next to him, and remembered that Lyra was not in a safe place.

Without thinking about consequences or risk, he touched down near the nunnery he knew she was at and made his way inside. It was empty of all adults and most of the children, yet he heard crying in one of the rooms. Some infants had been left behind, he realized with no little amount of horror, and he slowly approached Lyra through ankle-deep water with the motive to take her away from this place, to take her somewhere she would be safe and where he could trust she’d be protected from his and Marisa’s enemies--maybe even from Marisa herself.

Holding her in his arms again was like slotting a puzzle piece into place. She blinks up at him just as curiously as she had on the day she was born, and Asriel is tempted to stop and rock her to sleep right there in the nunnery--but he can’t. The water was rising, and in case anyone came back for the remaining children he could not be seen with Lyra. He takes her back to the gyrocopter and takes off, heading for Oxfordshire. He knows where he needs to go.

The entrance to Jordan college is now drowned in chest-deep water, but it doesn’t stop Asriel. He takes Lyra out of the copter and slowly wades into the water with her as if to baptize her, holding her above lapping waves, shushing her inaudibly when she sniffles and threatens to cry. She looks up at him with big, scared eyes, and he tries to smile for her, to show her that there was nothing to be afraid of. Stelmaria glides through next to him, keeping a watchful eye on the water level and how Asriel's arms would shift up and down with it to keep his daughter dry.

“Open the bloody door!” He hisses after he reaches the front entrance to the college through the courtyard. No one knocks after he bangs his fist on the door for a good minute, but then it creaks open and the headmaster looks rightly concerned at the sight of Lord Asriel holding a baby.

“What in the world…?” The master says, looking to Asriel for answers he wasn’t sure he could give. 

Asriel wastes no time in transferring Lyra to the master’s arms, watching as she kept her eyes on him as he gave her away. “This is Lyra, and Pantalaimon.”

“Asriel--” The master insists, now holding the baby against his better judgement.

He cuts him off. “I hereby invoke the privilege of scholastic sanctuary.” He says through gritted teeth, shivering in the cold. He stares the master down as if daring him to reject his request and Lyra.

The master seems appalled-- “Scholastic sanctuary? Jordan college is a place of learning, it is not suitable for a child!”

 _(Well it’s either this or a nunnery, or me.)_ Asriel thinks. _(And I have never been suitable for a child.)_

“Outside of the college she is not safe.” He insists, shaking his head. “I have no choice.”

Asriel wanted to have a choice, so desperately he wanted it, but Lyra would be safest far away from he and Marisa. He had made the mistake of trying to fight for her as her father before, and it ruined his life. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

He backs away from the master, back into the water and away from his baby. He points his finger at the master- “I have no choice! You keep her _safe!”_

The master is wordless, looking out at Asriel in the water, and Asriel forces himself to keep going, back to the gyrocopter, and to not look back. He fears he will break apart if he looks back.

It was for the best. Lyra would be safe at Jordan College, and if they know what’s good for her she will never know of her parents. She would be safe. That was all Asriel wanted. She needed to be safe.

\-------------

Lyra grew up at Jordan, and against what was best for her Asriel visits her when his travels land him back in Oxford. She does not know him as her father though, no she does not--to her, Lord Asriel is her uncle, distant and cold. He bears with the tugging on his heartstrings that happens whenever she calls him by the wrong title, and he forces himself to disconnect from the young child he had once felt move under his heart.

She idolizes him, which is not good. He can’t let her get attached, for it will only lead to bad things happening to them both, and he can’t take her bringing more misfortune to his life due to his love for her. He denies her pleading for him to take her with him to the north, and insists she stays at the college, even though he can clearly see she’s desperate to get out and go somewhere, _anywhere._ When he finds Dust, when he sees the city in the sky through the aurora, he knows she will want to see it too. She has his sense of adventure, but he cannot indulge it. He is dealing in matters too complex and too large for her to understand.

Asriel feels horrible whenever he leaves her on the airship lawn, staring up at him in the air. One day, maybe, she can come with him, but it will be a long time yet before she’s ready. It’s for her own good, he keeps telling himself. It’s for her own good.

Asriel goes back to the north with funding to continue his research on Dust, and gets imprisoned by Iofur. He tricks him into letting him stay under house arrest at his northern lab, and lives there quite normally. If this is to be the rest of his life, well...it could be worse. He could be imprisoned somewhere far away from his work rather than literally less than a mile below the aurora. He and Thorold work together on their studies on Dust as if nothing had ever happened, and the bears’ growling outside his lab fades away to blend in with the wind.

\---------------

Asriel wakes up in his bed a few hours after he laid down to rest with Stelmaria blinking green eyes at him calmly. His eyes sting, but he doesn’t know why and doesn’t want to find out, so he brushes past her and stands from his sheets, straightening his clothes out.

“Tell your daughter goodbye.” His daemon insists. “Please.”

With his hand on the doorknob to his room, to the rest of the lab where Lyra and Roger lay, Asriel pauses. He wants to have one last word with her, so badly. He wants to tell her everything.

Asriel wants Lyra to know how much she truly means to him, how much they are intertwined by blood and bone and soul. His blood runs through her veins, her arms and legs were formed from him. His fingers slip off of the doorknob and touch his stomach over his sweater, just slightly. She was right there.

And then his hand drops. He blinks wetness out of his eyes.

“No. I’ve told her enough.” He says in a sigh out. “She won’t want to hear anything else from me.”

Stelmaria pads up alongside him, not looking happy. “So we move on with the intercision project?”

Asriel takes a deep breath. He had to betray Lyra’s trust forever, make her hate him, kill her best friend. He had to for the good of mankind. 

She’ll understand someday, he thinks. Someday, everything will become clear. His little trickster will know the truth.

“Yes. We have no choice.”


End file.
